Movie 26: Invictus

Nelson Mandela has only recently come to power and he faces a number of challenges, including uniting a country that was divided by race for so long. To do this he focuses on the national Rugby team, the Springboks, who have large numbers of white supporters but not really any blacks. The aim is to rally everyone behind the national team for the upcoming world cup and help the divisions ease with a common target to root for.

And it works. Dunno if that should be counted as a spoiler but this is a true story so pay more attention in history class.

Mandela is a great man. I was born in 1980 so I remember him getting out of the nick and being elected. We were all very happy in my household when that happened. Being a child of the 80’s I’m still not really that big a fan of South Africa, hate the accent which doesn’t help. Or Russia at times for that matter but that’s way off topic. Morgan Freeman was the obvious choice to play him, along with being Mandela’s choice, so no surprise there. The only problem was that I wasn’t entirely sucked in by the performance. I never really stopped seeing Freeman and started seeing Mandela. Don’t get me wrong, he did a great job, but with such familiar faces (the actor AND the role) it was a bit of a losing battle.

I totally bought Matt Damon though, he nailed this one. And the rest of the supporting cast held there own.

There is one big problem though, nay a HUGE problem. I had no fucking clue what was happening for a quarter of the movie. I’m not a fan of Rugby. We played it for a few weeks every year in school but I’ve pretty much forgotten what the deal is. And there isn’t really any attempt to educate you in the film when there was ample opportunity.

The team is tasked with holding master classes in some of the townships, to get the black community involved. At the start of one of these lessons we’re told “the first rule of Rugby is that you can pass backwards or to the side”. Apparently that’s the only rule as they don’t tell us anything else. It would have been completely forgivable to have a Basil Exposition seen where we’re taught how the hell the game works. But we aren’t.

This problem is compounded by two things. The first game they play both sides seem to be wearing gold and green. I wasn’t sure whether to root for the guys in gold shirts or in green shirts. The second is that in the big match the score isn’t shown much until the end so I had trouble working out how close the game was. I actually thought they were getting HUMPED when they weren’t.

If you’re a Rugby fan you’ll probably like this a bit more than I did. I enjoyed the hell out of the movie, bar the fact I spent 20 minutes staring at a confusing mess of men fucking about with an egg shaped ball. That said, the way the matches were shot did show how bloody brutal the whole thing is.

I wish he’d just pointed the camera at the Haka though instead of moving it about so we could see the damned thing in all it’s glory. Matt Damon cam if you will.